“But he is mine. And yours. Like it or not, he’s our brother. They’ll never catch me betraying him.”
—Antigone
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- My brother Mike died while incarcerated in Jacksonville, Florida on December 23, 2021. He was found in his cell, alone, at 3:24pm.
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- I was not raised with Mike or my other brothers from my father’s first marriage. I only learned recently that he abandoned them. Shortly after he abandoned them, their mother was murdered. Nevertheless, Mike and I shared my biological mother or “mommy.” And she loved us both the same.
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- But there were the pictures. Old pictures with the weight of nearly deflated balloons, early polaroids. I met Mike at a gas station in Albany, GA when I was in my early 20s and from that moment he was in my life.
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- I miss my brother. I miss Mike. Goddamnit I miss my brother. He was mine. My brother. I have to live without my brother. I have to breathe this air that he no longer exhales into. And I miss my brother. I miss my motherfucking brother. And I hear my mother’s wail in the cathedral of my vagus nerve. Do you understand that I miss my brother? He was me. And I was him. Which means we are both dead. A part of me broke away and left with him. I couldn’t hold him when he died. We couldn’t hold each other when we died. I miss my brother. The sky will never be blue again. Mike was the blue sky and I lost my breath. I miss my brother. He was mine . . . for a time.
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- Maybe I am Ismene. I hate the potential because it raises the question, did I abandon my brother? Maybe. Ismene never had her own story; she was there to remind Antigone that if she protected her brother in death, that she too would die. A disaster. No one wrote Ismene’s story. No one recorded her grief. By the time Antigone dies and the epic ends, we can only assume that Ismene was left alone, her family dead (Maybe this is why). She refused to break laws of the world. She advised her sister Antigone to not bury their brother Polynices in order to preserve Antigone’s and her lives. Maybe this is about survivor’s guilt. Ismene and I become mirror images in survival. We each watch our families disappear into untimely deaths that are the product of a social curse, a social death that neither of our families can be blamed for initiating, but blamed, sardonically, for preserving. Like Sam Cooke said, like it is tattooed on my right thigh, like I am sure it was in Ismene’s heart: it’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die. (Otis said AND I’m afraid to die, these are two very different matters).
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- Mike was found dead in his jail cell from a fentanyl overdose. Guards help conceal it as it passes into the jails and prisons: on books pages, on clothing, in food, inside of people. Mike in a cell : Antigone hung herself after being walled alive into a tomb : being left to rot alone on a hill like Polynices : sitting inside myself, receded from the shore of reality…refusing.
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- My father too was a man of war. The most honest story he ever told me—because he lies more than he reveals the truth, so the difference is distinct—was of shooting an Afghani herder while overseas. Oedipus—the father of Antigone, Ismene, Polynices, and Eteocles—forgot his family while away at war. His crimes as a broken personality cursed his children and similarly my father’s trespasses curse my brothers and I with violence, with lack, with uncertainty, with being forgotten. Ismene bends like the branch of a willow, whirls with and around the shape of winds, survives through pliability. Antigone is a stone wielding a stone and for love, regardless of the curse, risks herself to preserve her family. Polynices and Eteocles are both inheritors of Thebes; Mike and our brother Robert fought similarly over who would be the metaphorical “man of the house.” There are many stories about how Polynices and Eteocles ended up dying on each other’s sword, but the apropos word for it all is neglect.
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- Mike was not buried justly and I did not interfere in that lack of justice. I couldn’t.
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- What other crisis of ancestry and inheritance opens a story about honor, love, social death, and accounting for your kin? What other story in our recent human history begins with a curse born in the corners of the most unforgiving illogic…? READ MORE
Sara Lippmann—Jessica Lanay, “I Am Not Antigone: Notes on Losing My Brother,” Eckleburg No. 22
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Jessica Lanay is a poet and short story writer originally from the Florida Keys. She is interested in writing towards the incalculable nature of human emotions, psychology, and metaphysical dilemmas. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and works at the Center for African American Poetry And Poetics. Her work can be found in Salt Hill Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Sugar House Review, and others. She is excited to have her work featured in The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, as she has been a fan for quite some time. Read more at lanay.me.